Dashboard Lights — Dickeson
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Well, what’s a “Dashboard?” Some new computer gizmo you’ve gotta have that’ll solve all your problems and make you rich? No way. You know what the dashboard is in your car. It’s the place you look when you hear a siren behind you so you can tap the brakes.
Curley was proud of the genuine leather dashboard in his “Surrey With the Fringe on the Top” in the musical Oklahoma. But, like in the ancient maps of the unknown, “There be dragons here” in that “Dashboard” named software metaphor. We tend to think of a dashboard as it is in our car or in a Boeing 747: an array of instruments providing instant information that enables corrective course decisions.
That’s the “metaphor trap.” It doesn’t work that way in a business. There is no array of instruments providing instant information. There are no brakes you can tap.
That software may work for those global or nationwide companies that have a need to assemble a lot of disparate Internet information from far-flung companies quickly in order to make decisions. There you can say the software application is like a dashboard—a simile. But it isn’t a Dashboard like in my car giving me instant readouts of rpm, fuel, door ajar, mph and the like. A dashboard metaphor it ain’t.
Dashboard-like software applications used to be sophisticated and costly. Now they’re not. There’s NetSuite, Salesforce.com and one of the printing software suppliers is even giving it away freely. Some are using a working relationship with Excel. (Is it any wonder that the printing management information system suppliers regard Excel as their prime competitor?)
Am I suggesting that printing companies use one of these so-called Dashboards? No way. I doubt we can ever take that metaphorical leap. Can we be ready for something like a Dashboard? That’s a different question, entirely. Weekly, maybe we can, as I suggest in Monday Morning Manager, for those of you who’ve had the patience to read it.
Why do I say this? Most of us really don’t know what the key metrics of our print business are, do we? It’s certainly not Budgeted Hourly Rates. They don’t mean diddley-squat when it comes to what’s happening now. It’s not “profit,” that rear-view mirror opinion we get long after it’s too late to do anything about it.
Time for a Tune-up?
Well, what are the brakes we could tap—if we could see a flashing red light? Do we know? Where and what is the number that says the engine is overheating for the company? Where and what is the number that says we’d better pull in at the next filling station because we’re running low on gas? These are the decisions we would make premised on our automobile dashboards. What are the equivalent printing company numbers?
Do they even exist? Do you know? Think about it.
We’re in this business to make a livelihood for ourselves and our colleagues. Until we’ve got some key metrics in our head, we’re running on guesswork. We’ve just got to do better than that. Let’s start with these metrics—by week.
1) Days Cash on Hand. Burning or generating?
2) Sales Booked Backlog. Staying ahead of the game?
3) Sales Orders Pending Backlog. What’s in the pipeline?
4) Days Paper Inventory on Hand. Overstocking will strangle us.
5) Days Sales on Hand. Uncollected accounts receivable are death.
6) Days Materials (Paper) in Work-in-Process. How long to get jobs through production?
7) Days Finished Goods Unbilled. Enough said, no excuses accepted.
8) Headcount. How many people, including all sales, executive, administrative and part-timers, are actually drawing checks from the company?
What else? What would you add? Can we get these metrics from our current MIS system by week? Why not? They’re crucial. Can we make corrective decisions weekly? That’s “like” a Dashboard for our commercial printing business.
What decisions would we make if we had these weekly metrics? Could we increase accountability by assigning responsibility for oversight of each metric? Could we set goals for each? Would we?
What should our headcount be? Each of these metrics provokes some detailed and careful thought. There are no quick answers. We have some thinking to do. Maybe there are better, more relevant, metrics. This is just one man’s opinion.
So, where are we? We’re not ready to look at any of those so-called Dashboards, or anything like them, and make decisions based on the metrics of our business. We just haven’t got even those weekly metrics! (Not that we couldn’t get them if we really wanted them!) And we have no experience using them even if we had them.
We still look at Budgeted Hourly Rates tied to factory labor costs because that’s our tradition—the way we’ve always done things around here. We’ll have to break that habit. But old habits die hard, don’t they? Just try putting your shoes on before your underwear some time.
When we’re ready, perhaps we’ll first try a page of eight graphs in an Excel workbook linked to data pages of 13-week rolling sets of those metrics. The graphs should automatically change each week as we add and delete a week from the linked rolling quarter of data. This way we’re coming close to a Dashboard-like thing for our printing plant.
How would you like to see a page of graphs of the eight metrics I suggested? Would you know more about your company? Would you—could you—make better informed decisions about critical issues? It’d be like seeing eight editorial cartoons at a glance, every week. What do you see now? Anything?
Too bad we can’t get our print management information suppliers to take the lead in getting us these simple weekly numbers and graphs. They probably would if they thought there was a market for them and they could make a buck or two. But they won’t until we demand them. I guess we’ll have to wait until something trickles down from the big guys. But will we be ready when it does?
—ROGER V. DICKESON
About the Author
Roger Dickeson is a printing consultant located in Pasadena, CA. He can be reached at rogervd@sbcglobal.net. A PDF copy of his recent book, Monday Morning Manager, is available without charge by e-mail request.
